[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias

[M. Creidieki Crouch]

> It's funny, but I quite often create "expert" articles on subjects I'd bet
> that few wikipedians know about, or have even heard of (e.g.:<
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy%27s_equation>). But I've yet to have one
> listed on AFD because they are ignorant of the subject, and I'm in no danger
> of being driven off. Perhaps there's more to the problem than just the
> "proud ignorance" of AFDers.

The problem is definitely much less severe in technical fields.  But
all of these specialized articles serve a common problem: failure to
establish context.

When I wrote [[conditional quantum entropy]], I didn't include enough
information to tell a general audience how important it was.  It might
be taught in every undergraduate QM course (no).  It might be a
specialized topic used by specialized researchers (yes).  But people
see the article, and say, "this is science, I can't tell how important
it is, I don't want to be the one who nominates this".  I'm confident
that it can get filled out later.

But in the current atmosphere you can't do that with, say, webcomics. 
Any article on a webcomic *should* explain to a general audience what
the importance of the article is.  Things are important because of
their larger context, and a webcomic article needs to explain that it
has 1000 readers, that it was the first keenspace comic to use
this-and-that artistic technique, that it was a major influence on
Penny Arcade, that it was an early exploration of this-or-that theme
in webcomic history.  All of those things are much more important than
a list of characters, but they're *hard*, and maybe they'll come over
time.  But these days we're not waiting for them.

In conclusion, I have no idea what position I just took.

-- Creidieki